these are my current projects. I wrote the summaries for the "EVERYONE QUICK describe your oc story in the worst way possible" post, and i like them, so. Send me a title, optionally a question too, and I will talk about it!! Tell me what you'd like to hear or any questions or just send the title and i will rant.
OC OR MOSTLY OC:
ElemenTale: components of one big magic thing get personified, try to murder each other and fail
To Catch a Shuttle: programmer hates her job SO BADLY she decides fuck it I'd rather spy for space pirates
Shatterworld: magicians who hate each other go on a long roadtrip because money
Minds Remembered: clone blues but make it dystopian underground
By the Bootstraps: someone said nonhumans arent accepted at a military academy. a harpy said I DONT CARE
Worlds Remembered: wait the surface ISN'T so destroyed people can't live there?! (sequel to MiRe)
Hybridtales: Scientists get commissioned to create police for the Big Brother. The geneticists lose to the engineers, but now there are creatures
FANFICTION WITH CANON CHARACTERS IN IT:
In its Infinite Complexity: Disabled programmer with a Fear attached is desperate for a job. The Magnus Institute forgot to take down a job offer from the interwebs. (TMA, we do not see canon, post season one AU) alternatively: the Spiral and the Eye are uncompatible unless math
FYI: pinning and reblogging and queueing and expanding this one, it's a good project list. Edits are coming as needed
Little drabble with my characters chilling in a hotel, at @camp-marago
*
"Oh, God, I hope I can leave," she says, and then, suddenly, Leslie is sitting in a chair in the hotel lobby.
"Oh, Fey, you know this," he says. "I the person am not stronger than I the force of nature." He glances at the dragon lady, then turns his attention back to Fey. "You want to get lost - and you will get lost. You can get on a train, and it will take you there."
Fey needs to process this for a moment. Hesitantly, she walks to the hotel lobby's lounge area, to sit next to him - he looks almost completely like a human tourist, he is just... a bit hazy; the details are hard to see, hard to recall. But Fey is used to her ethereal companion's weirdness.
"You sure?" she asks. Leslie laughs.
"I've never been more sure about anything."
He stands up to circle around Fey like a vulture would. His steps are slow and deliberate - oh, he is in no hurry at all.
"Dear, I have no power to stop you, nor do I want to. You're marked. Not by me the person, by me the Lost." A little chuckle. "Do you know why you're alive, and my mother isn't? It wasn't a favor, it was an inevitability. Even though she was delicious."
"Please don't say it like that." Fey waits for Leslie to continue, but he doesn't. He waits for Fey to ask the question, and she sighs, and obliges: "Why didn't I die?"
"Your mother was terrified. She was so easy to torture. You, however - you embraced it. You are one to seek out being lost."
"And that's enough."
"If you're marked - it is. That is what I've done."
"Do you just-- do you just want to rope me into... whatever thing you got going on?"
"Maybe." He laughs. "If I want to teleport most people, I actually have to try. It's like getting a cat into a water. Most will fight, tire themselves out, and drown, to be food for fish. And some of us swim."
"...And turn into fish?"
"In this analogy, yes."
"Swimming cats turn into fish. Wonderful." She sighs. Oh, she looks so very tired. "So you're sure I'm not trapped. Like, as long as I'm marked, I'll never be trapped."
"You might be locked out of places, but never locked in."
*by this I mean what color do you associate with it. for example, when writing ideas in my notes app I use purple for a certain wip. for another, a certain color is a central theme. no wrong answers!
Everyone from a different culture seems strangely poetic and profoundly deep in their observations, but only because they speak whatever the common tongue is as a second language, and whatever they are saying is actually mostly just clumsily translated common sayings/figures of speech that flow much better in their own tongue, and make perfect sense to the people who understand the cultural context.
Someone who comes from a place where geodes are common will describe another person: "He is like a stone that seems to hold a treasure inside of it - you learn to know such stones by their shape and their weight - but once you split it open, there is no quartz, no amethyst, no sparkling and brilliant crystal you expected. Just solid rock, through and through. He is like one of those rocks." Which vaguely makes sense, but they're clearly frustrated about not being quite able to express what they're trying to say.
The thing is, in their own first language, there's a specific word for this kind of rock - one that outwardly seems to be a geode but it isn't one after all. This word is also commonly used as an insult, to describe a person who is charismatic, convincing and outwardly seems brilliantly smart, but is actually dumb as shit.
human, speaking dwarvish to an dwarf: "this quest you're on, it's like... when the rains come, and the sun shines through the water in the air, and the raindrops form a prism through which sunlight casts a shimmering illusion of rings of colour across the sky, it's as if the ribbons of light are indicating some great treasure that you can never find, because the coloured lights are an illusion. and pursuing the lights will just lead you on and on forever."
dwarf: :o "that's so beautiful..."
...
human, speaking humanish to a human: "his quest is like he's looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
"We got to do as... As... When there's a destructive solar flare and you're in the highsun desert, you can see it in – no, sorry, you can't see that color... we can see it a few minutes before it gets really bad, and when that happens, we have to get underground into one of the shelters or you die – this sounds like that, seeing the first sign of a flare"
"There's a difference between losing an arm and losing... another arm... you guys have WAY too few words for arm."
"That's horrifying. Elaborate."
"So you human only have four arms, and two of them are different but all of them are permanent, right, we call those hnuh arms, but we also have looht arm, that are small and weak, and they are made to be lost - if something is chasing you, it can have your looht so you save your hnuh... there's a difference between, you know, going into something and losing a bit of yourself, and going into something and having a gaping hole where your arm is supposed to be."
I'm going to preface this by saying that i am not an expert in ANY form of poetry, just an enthusiast. Also, this post is... really long. Too long? Definitely too long. Whoops! I love poetry.
If you ask most English-speaking people (or haiku-bot) what a haiku is, they would probably say that it's a form of poetry that has 3 lines, with 5, and then 7, and then 5 syllables in them. That's certainly what I was taught in school when we did our scant poetry unit, but since... idk elementary school when I learned that, I've learned that that's actually a pretty inaccurate definition of haiku. And I think that inaccurate definition is a big part of why most people (myself included until relatively recently!) think that haiku are kind of... dumb? unimpressive? simple and boring? I mean, if you can just put any words with the right number of syllables into 3 lines, what makes it special?
Well, let me get into why the 5-7-5 understanding of haiku is wrong, and also what makes haiku so special (with examples)!
First of all, Japanese doesn't have syllables! There's a few different names for what phonetic units actually make up the language- In Japanese, they're called "On" (音), which translates to "sound", although English-language linguists often call it a "mora" (μ), which (quoting from Wikipedia here) "is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable." (x) "Oh" is one syllable, and also one mora, whereas "Oi" has one syllable, but two moras. "Ba" has one mora, "Baa" has two moras, etc. In English, we would say that a haiku is made up of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables in them, 17 syllables total. In Japanese, that would be 17 sounds.
For an example of the difference, the word "haiku", in English, has 2 syllables (hai-ku), but in Japanese, はいく has 3 sounds (ha-i-ku). "Christmas" has 2 syllables, but in Japanese, "クリスマス" (ku-ri-su-ma-su) is 5 sounds! that's a while line on its own! Sometimes the syllables are the same as the sounds ("sushi" is two syllables, and すし is two sounds), but sometimes they're very different.
In addition, words in Japanese are frequently longer than their English equivalents. For example, the word "cuckoo" in Japanese is "ほととぎす" (hototogisu).
Now, I'm sure you're all very impressed at how I can use an English to Japanese dictionary (thank you, my mother is proud), but what does any of this matter? So two languages are different. How does that impact our understanding of haiku?
Well, if you think about the fact that Japanese words are frequently longer than English words, AND that Japanese counts sounds and not syllables, you can see how, "based purely on a 17-syllable counting method, a poet writing in English could easily slip in enough words for two haiku in Japanese” (quote from Grit, Grace, and Gold: Haiku Celebrating the Sports of Summer by Kit Pancoast Nagamura). If you're writing a poem using 17 English syllables, you are writing significantly more content than is in an authentic Japanese haiku.
(Also not all Japanese haiku are 17 sounds at all. It's really more of a guideline.)
Focusing on the 5-7-5 form leads to ignoring other strategies/common conventions of haiku, which personally, I think are more interesting! Two of the big ones are kigo, a season word, and kireji, a cutting word.
Kigo are words/phrases/images associated with a particular season, like snow for winter, or cherry blossoms for spring. In Japan, they actually publish reference books of kigo called saijiki, which is basically like a dictionary or almanac of kigo, describing the meaning, providing a list of related words, and some haiku that use that kigo. Using a a particular kigo both grounds the haiku in a particular time, but also alludes to other haiku that have used the same one.
Kireji is a thing that doesn't easily translate to English, but it's almost like a spoken piece of punctuation, separating the haiku into two parts/images that resonate with and add depth to each other. Some examples of kireji would be "ya", "keri", and "kana." Here's kireji in action in one of the most famous haiku:
古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音
(Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto)
(The old pond —
A frog jumps in
The sound of the water.)
You can see the kireji at the end of the first line- 古池や literally translates to "old pond ya". The "ya" doesn't have linguistic meaning, but it denotes the separation between the two focuses of the haiku. First, we are picturing a pond. It's old, mature. The water is still. And then there's a frog! It's spring and he's fresh and new to the world! He jumps into the pond and goes "splash"! Wowie! When I say "cutting word", instead of say, a knife cutting, I like to imagine a film cut. The camera shows the pond, and then it cuts to the frog who jumps in.
English doesn't really have a version of this, at least not one that's spoken, but in English language haiku, people will frequently use a dash or an ellipses to fill the same role.
Format aside, there are also some conventions of the actual content, too. They frequently focus on nature, and are generally use direct language without metaphor. They use concrete images without judgement or analysis, inviting the reader to step into their shoes and imagine how they'd feel in the situation. It's not about describing how you feel, so much as it's about describing what made you feel.
Now, let's put it all together, looking at a haiku written Yosa Buson around 1760 (translated by Harold G. Henderson)
The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel
We've got our kigo with "the piercing chill." We read that, and we imagine it's probably winter. It's cold, and the kind of cold wind that cuts through you. There's our kireji- this translation uses a colon to differentiate our two images: the piercing chill, and the poet stepping on his dead wife's comb. There's no descriptions of what the poet is feeling, but you can imagine stepping into his shoes. You can imagine the pain he's experiencing in that moment on your own.
"But tumblr user corvidcall!" I hear you say, "All the examples you've used so far are Japanese haiku that have been translated! Are you implying that it's impossible for a good haiku to be written in English?" NO!!!!! I love English haiku! Here's a good example, which won first place in the 2000 Henderson haiku contest, sponsored by the Haiku Society of America:
When you read this one, can you imagine being in the poet's place? Do you feel the surprise as the tide comes in? Do you feel the summer-ness of the moment? Haiku are about describing things with the senses, and how you take in the world around you. In a way, it's like the poet is only setting a scene, which you inhabit and fill with meaning based on your own experiences. You and I are imagining different beaches, different waves, different people that make up the "our" it mentioned.
"Do I HAVE to include all these things when I write haiku? If I include all these things, does that mean my haiku will be good?" I mean, I don't know. What colors make up a good painting? What scenes make up a good play? It's a creative medium, and nobody can really tell you you can't experiment with form. Certainly not me! But I think it's important to know what the conventions of the form are, so you can appreciate good examples of it, and so you can know what you're actually experimenting with. And I mean... I'm not the poetry cops. But if you're not interested in engaging with the actual conventions and limitations of the form, then why are you even using that form?
I'll leave you with one more English language haiku, which is probably my favorite haiku ever. It was written by Tom Bierovic, and won first place at the 2021 Haiku Society of America Haiku Awards
a year at most . . .
we pretend to watch
the hummingbirds
Sources: (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x)
Further reading:
Forms in English Haiku by Keiko Imaoka
Haiku: A Whole Lot More Than 5-7-5 by Jack
How to Write a Bad Haiku by KrisL
Haiku Are Not a Joke: A Plea from a Poet Who Has Had It Up to Here by Sandra Simpson
Haiku Checklist by Katherine Raine
An older piece of writing, made for the first line prompt "They always have been watching, and they always will be watching." This is to celebrate that my commissions are open now! :D
Enjoy! :D
*
“They always have been watching, and they always will be watching.” The goat lady stares into my eyes, and I avert my gaze to look at one of her does, who works very hard on making the entire meadow barren and plantless.
“You mean the train guys?”
“The travellers, yes.” Without warning, she yells out: “Elek, you damned idiot, get your ass back here!” When Elek the goat maas back at us, she nods and continues, as if nothing happened. “They always show up when you do, and they just hang around.”
“You see them?”
“C’mon, you know them better than that.”
I did know the train guys better than that, yes. For a few minutes, we just sat together in silence, watching the goats and the passing clouds, with the goat lady yelling at her cattle to not eat plastic.
“But...” I clear my throat. “But what are they? The train guys, the… the travellers? I… think I see them sometimes, on the...” On tram 6 and the train-replacement buses, I want to say, but I realize the goat lady has never been to either. “...when I travel. But I’m never sure.”
“Spirits” she nods. “It‘s just how it is with them. But they’ve taken a liking to you.” She flashes a smile. “There’s never this many around unless you show up, you know? And even then, they are peaceful as can be.” She squints at me, and that’s how I know she’s curious about something. “Some even say they’re the ones who tell you those secrets.”
“What secrets?” Maybe asking which of them would be more appropriate, but this gets an answer too.
“About the small beings that make one sick. Or how the lightning likes to strike.”
“Oh! No, those are… different.” I looked them up on the internet, I’d say to anyone else. But this lady, who’ve never seen a phone, nor a radio, who was only familiar with the rusting corpses of trains, would not get anything from that. “Those are… spirits of thought, who lived in those… tall towers. Electric ghosts. They used to… used to send thoughts and tales between people. I meet them in my dreams.”
“And they tell you these things.”
“If I ask them, yeah.”
She nods sagely, and I stare into the sun. I am surprised how calmly she takes this, but then, she takes everything calmly.
“Can I ask a favor from you?”
“Sure.”
“Can you ask one of those ghosts if it knows what’s up with one of my goats? Janey, here. I think she’ll get ill. She looks all weird.”
“I… can” I say carefully. “But we… she might be done for.”
“I know.”
“Okay. I’ll, I’ll ask them this night.”
*
It’s the first thing I do when my alarm startles me awake; even before making oatmeal and coffee for breakfast, I’m looking at goat illnesses on my phone. I almost miss my bus because of it; I get on at the last moment, and stare out of the windows, into the sunless dawn of the winters, into the blinking city lights.
I am not sure which one is the dream anymore, the buzzing city, alive with millions of people or the ruins with barely a few hundred; the ruins that looked like they were this world and this now. Once, in the far past.
Guys for my story. They go on a hiking trip together into a fantasy wilderness that kills so many people it wasn't crossed for a long time.
SERGIO NECTRIS, he/him – The mapmaker. He’s scrawny and pale, with short black hair, green eyes. He dresses in long, flowy coats, mostly to avoid getting noticed, but he often carries shiny or colorful object with himself. He uses hereditary magic that lets him communicate with crows. Socially awkward and perpetually lonely, he rarely talks to people. Has learnt some sciences, including cartography, cryptography, and optics. Likes to read in his free time. He struggles with a family headed by a controlling father.
According to the stereotypes, he’s a black magician; this is indicated by him having eyes that can light up like a cat’s if the light hits them right.
RANRIL HALLE, they/he – The fighter. He’s heavy-set, with a broad shoulder, shoulder-length, straight gray-blue hair, blue markings. He looks considerably more healthy than Sergio, and he dresses a bit more flashily, though his first priority is free movement. He uses hereditary magic that lets him create so-called Sanctuaries, little, peaceful pockets of space that only the people and things he lets in can get into. He’s active and outgoing, prefers either physical activity or talking to his friends. He uses several kinds of weapons well, likes to hike in their free time. Struggles with too much responsibility placed on him too early.
According to the stereotypes, he’s from a freeloading family that has nothing and does nothing.
INGRISS NASSIN-ERNOD, she/her – The magical researcher. She’s lithe and very pretty, with long, brown hair, an always disapproving, lavender-grey gaze. She dresses in light colors, expensive and well-made dresses, usually. She uses partially learnt, partially inherited magic, that lets her create and teleport between little swathes of mirage, and that lets her sense and identify living beings and magical energy. She’s reserved, always proper and polite, someone who can chat with anyone nicely, and who seems unfazed by any insult. She likes to paint on a variety of objects and dance. She knows several social sciences, debating, law, languages, and magical science. She struggles with a need to be perfect.
According to the stereotypes, she’s a fragile, pure lady.
RAENA, she/her – The diplomat. She’s a harpy, with a heart-shaped face, broad shoulders, but thin limbs, she has a pair of pure white wings, and claws. She dresses in anything but her fellow harpies’ clothes, instead modifying anything she can get her hands on. Doesn’t use magic. She’s soft, social and empathetic, a great listener who will mingle with anyone. She sews in her free time, if she’s not out socialising. She has practice with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and can fight with a spear decently, but she is on the team for her talent to talk to people. She struggles with not having a place to fit in.
According to stereotypes, she’s wild and uncivilised.
SEADEW, they/them – The medic. They are thin and lanky, with a few plant tattoos, and green hair. They wear cheap, simple clothes they can move in easily. Uses learnt ritual magic that lets them heal beings, repair objects, cleanse areas and create protection. They are cynical and world-weary, who will mostly crack rude jokes. They habitually chase any small pleasure they can get the moment they can get it. They like to make music in their free time. They have knowledge of plants, weeds and herbs, and they are used to handling crises. They struggle with not having the means to live comfortably.
So. We encounter the Supefluous Tentacle Cult -- also known as the Many-Limbed People of Zachroom 7 -- in the first and fifth episodes, and never again. As most of the aliens, we don't know much about them, so I could wordbuild to my little heart's content!
The guys came out utterly terrifying, but actually they are pretty peaceful.
Worldbuilding under the cut.
So, Trexel told us that these things are about three feet tall, are a cult, and that they had six hundred thousand hatchlings last year according to the Stellar Firma system. The brief told the guys that they needed the hatchworld just "at the right shade of boiling", therefore they made a boiling hot planet. It turns out that was too hot; Hartro tells us that two thousand and then some some hatchlings got cooked.
Now. If you write that up to the story being inconsistent due to improv, we can say that Trexel killed off the entire species, which would be on par with Trexel's usual work, but I like to believe that the Superfluous Tentacle weren't a collective idiot and put some of their hatchlings elsewhere. It looks like these hatchlings were under the care of one person, Nurturer 163, so it's likely that there are about two hundred Nurturers. Also, one nurturer managing this many larvae suggests that they are an R-selector species, who produce a lot of offspring, most of which die before maturity.
That's more or less what canon offers, it's all my headcanons and worldbuilding from now on.
I made the Superfluous Tentacle species come from a gas giant, high in the stratosphere, with no ground in sight, only floatings structures they built themselves. In that environment, since things tend to fall down, there aren't a lot of nutrients, which would mean everything eats everything else. There are a lot of ambush predators, carnivorous flowers, and other arboreal dangers around, so the smart, but small Tentacle People had to adapt for danger.
The head-like organ, with six eyes, a mouth-like thing and the crown of tentacles is not near their brain, that is deep inside their body, protected by the only bone-like structure, a skull, in their anatomy. Instead, this is used to communicate, observe, and to escape.
The hole is not the mouth, it's the hole they breathe out of. (Not breathe in, they have a bunch of other holes for that.) The thin tentacles along that are sensory organs, they are equipped with mechano- heat- and olfactory receptors. They also break off very easily if their owner is scared.
When one of the Tentacle People has to haul ass, they breathe out from the hole on their head very violently, and that lauches them in the other direction. The thin tentacle flail behind them. They are very easy to grab onto by any potential threat, and if that happens, a few of them will break off, like the tail of a lizard. The predator will usually settle and eat the tentacle, and let the person escape.
The core of their economy is what I call "whale upfall". Down, deeper near the planet's core, there is an ecosystem based off of some lifeforms that get by on electricity. (Handwaving the how; i don't have enough idea.) There are very large, whale-like beings there, who have an air sac, an organ that has low-pressure gas in it that helps them control how high or low they float. Now, the whales have to actively pull muscles to get it to a higher pressure -- so when they die, they float up. The Tentacle People live off of the floating, huge carcasses, slowly picking the meat off of them, fighting anything and everything else that wants to eat it, and, eventually, they build floating islands from the skeletons.
They are somewhat of a hivemind. There are always a high number of workers around a hatch pond to protect it from anything that could harm it, and they die a lot, but nobody pays a lot of it. This is why Trexel says they are a cult.
The "right shade of boiling" is a mistranslation. The Nurturer meant "boiling" as "the surface moves a lot" - so, they wanted a lot of things for the larvae to eat that move. And the larvae to move a lot.
They didn't start a war for the dead larvae because most larvae would have died anyways, but they did relieve Nurterer 163 of their position. I'm not sure if they straight up killed them, or just put them on a pace shuttle and told them to never come back.
Also: like sea otters, the Tentacle People face the danger of floating off into oblivion if they fall asleep. Therefore, they always cling to something when sleeping. They sleep holding each other's tentacles often.
Write about a roomba which has somehow gained sentience. How intelligent is it? How does it perceive humans? Does it behave like a hostile AI? A dog? A human? Does it wish to do more than just clean? Or maybe cleaning is how it feeds? How would it react to ending up locked in a bathroom or another place far away from its charging dock? What is its relationship with its owners like?
Tumblr has already done extensive research and theory round robins on this subject.
Basically; It’s more intelligent than we are and the most dangerous thing in existence when something sharp is within its grasp. So, of course, it’s a member of the family.
The roomba wasn’t meant to be sentient. Or sapient.
It was pretty dumb, in fact. It knew its way around the floors, knew where the difficult rug was, and it eventually memorised when its humans were out and about. Most importantly, it knew what its job was.
clean floor
And clean the floor was what it did, returning to its charging dock time to time to charge.
home safe
This was the strongest of its opinions. It hated being stepped on, and nobody did that in the dock.
The humans didn’t notice anything until the fateful day the roomba found a marble.
It was moving on from the different rug to the smooth floor when it nugde its side. It turned towards it, and it made a wonderful observation.
rolls
The movement and how sparkly the marble was, how it refracted light; that was wonderful to see. At first, certainly; it got less appealing when it stopped. So the roomba thought and did the only logical thing:
more roll
It nudged the marble again and again, and it agreeably rolled every time. Its humans didn’t take notice at first, only after it chased that marble for a long time.
“What are you doing?”
Of course, the roomba could not answer. Instead, it abandoned its beloved marble.
clean floor
But it returned to its marble when humans were out, or asleep. Those good times when humans didn’t step on it became its secret, when it could chase the marble around, always with the same thought:
more roll
Stories from the Silver Serpent @snakestories - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
